The Joker: A Memoir

Introduction

Where the Naughty Boys and Girls Live

Though I’ve been a serious poet, a student of poetry, and a teacher of poetry for forty years, I can’t recite from memory ten consecutive lines of William Butler Yeats, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, or even Robert Frost, about whom I’m writing a book. But I can tell you the knock-knock jokes I heard when I was ten, all of them, and every week I still read Doodles, the children’s comic strip in the Sunday paper, just in case it runs a pun or knock-knock joke I don’t know. (Q: What do you call a cow with two legs? A: Lean beef.)

Since junior high, I’ve been a joker, a punster, a laugher—someone who will say almost anything for a laugh. I don’t mean the chuckle that greets the mild obligatory jokes that ease the congregation into the sermon or punctuate an after-dinner speech—though I enjoy those too. What I love is raucous gut laughter—the kind that earns angry stares from the tables near you in a restaurant and makes strangers in the mall exchange knowing looks about the prevalence of drug use among nearsighted middle-aged bald men in polo shirts and chinos. Laughing until you are weak, gasping, holding your sides, barely able to stand is like a drug. I have laughed until I have fallen on the floor in public places. I couldn’t have stopped myself if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to.

I love how jokes either work or don’t. You are either a funny man or a fool, and to my anguish I am often a fool. I live uneasily with the fact that my joking sometimes makes others uneasy: uneasiness is the spring of the jack-in-the-box. Jokes delight us by making us nervous and then relieving the nervous tension. Pleasure needs friction as well as lubrication: the friction comes from fear and pain; wordplay releases the tension. Jokers make us anxious because they want something from us. Or to be more precise: I make you nervous because I want something from you—laughter—and to make you laugh I have to juggle subjects that make you laugh.

Shortly before his death in 2009, Fritz Darges, a Waffen-SS officer, told a German newspaper that he still believed Hitler was a genius, the greatest man who’d ever lived, and he’d gladly serve him again. I don’t exactly take Darges as my hero, but there is one moment in his life I ponder with renewed delight as well as a frisson of incipient panic. Darges was awarded two Iron Crosses and a Knight’s Cross, but the bravest thing he ever did—also the stupidest—took place in a 1944 strategy meeting in Hitler’s famous Wolf’s Lair when he was serving as army adjutant to the Führer. As Hitler and his staff officers consulted a large map stretched out on a table, a fly buzzed around the confined bunker, landing first on the map, then Hitler’s shoulder, and then the map again. Annoyed, the Führer ordered Darges to kill it. Without a moment’s hesitation, Darges informed Hitler that the fly was an airborne pest and therefore the responsibility of Nicolaus von Below, the nearby Luftwaffe adjutant.

I love the joke, but I love, fear, and identify with the impulse that drove Darges to tell it. By 1944, when he’d been Hitler’s adjutant for fifteen months, he must have had an inkling that the Führer wasn’t blessed with a wide and generous sense of humor. Didn’t matter. Darges had his joke, it was a good one, and he had to tell it—and the joke is funnier now because it was dangerous then. In fact, Hitler turned to Darges and screamed, You’re for the Eastern Front! Darges’s cleverness wouldn’t be a tenth as funny if he’d cracked wise to an indulgent and chuckling Uncle Adolf.

Darges’s impulse is one I know well. I’m one of those compulsive jokers whose need to laugh can seem peculiar, immature, and even socially corrosive to those who do not share it. Our need to tell jokes trumps our sense of propriety and good sense. Here’s an example. After a section of this book was published in The Kenyon Review, I received an e-mail from the poet Chard deNiord, who reminded me of a joke I told at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Drinks in hand, Chard and I were talking to the poet Richard Wilbur. I was in awe, almost cripplingly so, that I was having a drink with Dick—he asked me to call him Dick—Wilbur, the man who had written some of the best poems of the last century, not to mention the libretto for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Because the joke had been burning a hole in my mind for a couple of days, I asked Dick if he’d heard the latest O. J. Simpson joke. Only a month before, Nicole Simpson had been murdered along with her friend Ron Goldman, who had dropped by her house to return a pair of glasses left at the restaurant where he waited tables, and I was fascinated by the jokes the murder had inspired.

No, Wilbur replied warily. I doubt many people in his circles luxuriate in jokes about tabloid murders, but my social discomfort made me stupidly stubborn. I’d already committed myself to telling the joke, hadn’t I? Wasn’t it better to be a boor than a coward or a tease?

What’s the first thing Ron Goldman said to Nicole Simpson in heaven? I asked.

Even more warily than before, the poet who had translated Molière, Corneille, and Racine into English, asked, What?

"Here’re your fucking glasses!"

Chard tells me that he laughed. Wilbur, the most gracious genius I have ever met, chuckled politely. And I let out a belly laugh at my own joke. I’ll never forget how unabashed you were and how much I admired you for that, Chard wrote. I was startled by his admiration, because I was abashed. At the time, I thought I’d made a fool of myself, and in retrospect I’m sure of it. My insecurities and obsessions had turned me into a clown. But I’m pleased Chard laughed and holds the memory fondly in mind. That’s a pretty good payoff for telling a joke pinned to a crime rapidly passing into the vast chronicles of celebrity homicides. Still, a clown knows the cost of being a clown. For a laugh, I exploded any chance of becoming friends with Mr. Wilbur, a poet I admire immensely. But the clown also knows the joke was especially funny to Chard because he heard it against the background of Richard Wilbur’s wariness.

Here’s another story. Again it takes place during the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, during my first summer teaching there. To my discomfort, I was a junior colleague to Anthony Hecht and John Hollander, poets whose poems and essays I’d read, admired, and studied for a quarter of a century. Hecht and Hollander’s mandarin erudition was intimidating, and the one time I finagled a seat at Tony Hecht’s lunch table, he offered only short, distracted answers to direct questions. I read his shyness as distaste for me and for my poems, which I assumed (and still assume) he found crude—the unrefined product of an unrefined mind. And by God, when people think I’m a vulgarian, I’ll do my damnedest to prove them right. I can’t stop myself. Freud would call this impulse a minor manifestation of the death wish. Edgar Allan Poe more resonantly termed it the imp of the perverse, a phrase that captures the ornery humor of deliberately discharging a pistol into one’s metatarsals to astound people with my talent for insouciantly crippling myself, and then limping off on bloody feet as if I had accomplished something—the limp of the perverse.

During their poetry readings both Hollander and Hecht paused to sip water. As they did, each remarked that the poet Randall Jarrell had once observed that sipping water during a poetry reading was the single most pretentious thing a poet can do. It did not occur to me that they, famous as they were, might feel self-conscious reading to a room full of writers. But I was. And in my insecurity I thought it might be funny to follow their lead and then go further. At the podium, I held up a glass of water, reminded the audience what Jarrell had said, and speculated that Jarrell might not have known there is a pretentious side of the glass and a non-pretentious side.

I placed my finger on the lip of the glass closest to me and said, This is the pretentious side. Then, pointing to the far side of the glass, I pronounced, And this is the unpretentious side. Do you know why? Someone said no, and I tipped that side into my mouth. Water poured out the lower lip of the glass and down my shirt and pants. It’s a junior high joke I’d often heard of but never seen, so I was surprised at how thoroughly I drenched myself with a small cup of water. The audience sat still for half a breath, before someone laughed and the laughter took off. But only half the audience joined in. The non-laughers obviously thought my clowning was a breach of the decorum of poetry readings—precisely the thing the laughers enjoyed. From what I gathered later, Hollander and Hecht perceived my buffoonery as a barely concealed way of calling them pretentious. That was not my conscious intention, though now, to my regret, I see that interpretation is inevitable. After the reading, a small group laughed with me about the reading and my stunt, among them the wonderful playwright Horton Foote. His pink face shining with amusement, Horton took my hand between his and said he’d love to direct me in a play. He’d seen the teasing and playfulness I’d intended, and appreciated my playing with the audience instead of ignoring their presence. Maybe he shared my discomfort with the near-religious solemnity that often accompanies literary readings. His kindness saved me from even more self-loathing than I later felt. But as I put the glass to my mouth, when I was already committed to the act and couldn’t back down, I understood that I was as likely to annoy people as amuse them, though I only wanted to entertain, to jest.

Being a jester is, historically, a high-risk profession. In medieval and Renaissance courts, jesters softened with humor truths forbidden those without official license to amuse the monarch. But a successful jester needed tact and a discerning alertness to the king’s mood. After assuring us that it was extremely rare for a jester to be punished, Beatrice Otto, in Fools Are Everywhere, goes on to recount enough beheadings, stranglings, disfigurements, banishments, and autos-da-fé to give even the most benign wit a reason to think twice before teasing a king.

Just in case you think, as I do, that it might be amusing to imply that a king’s wife is promiscuous and his daughter a bastard, you should know that when his beloved jester Will Somers did just that, Henry VIII threatened to kill him with his bare hands. Somers, who amused Henry by eating and sleeping with the royal spaniels, was forgiven. Archibald Armstrong, jester to James VI and Charles I, was not. Archy disliked William Laud, the diminutive Archbishop of Canterbury, and at a royal supper, the jester offered grace before the meal with a pun: Great praise be given to God and little laud to the devil. His joke was good enough for him to keep his head and his job despite his audacious effrontery. But after Laud’s attempt to impose Anglican religious services on the Presbyterian Scots led to the Scottish rebellion of 1637, Archy, meeting Laud in the street, asked, Who’s fool now? After Laud complained, it was ordered he [Armstrong] should be carried to the porter’s lodge, his coat pulled over his ears, and kicked out of the court, never to enter within the gates. Being stripped of the king’s scarlet livery seems fair punishment for a fool who, in anger and animosity, resorted to calling his victim the true fool, the oldest and bluntest arrow in any fool’s quiver.

•  •  •

Though I’m not particularly worried about being beheaded or burned at the stake, I do worry about losing my job or offending friends and acquaintances. On recent teaching evaluations, one student complained that I made far too many references to bodily fluids even for a graduate class, and another participant at a writers’ conference expressed concern that my delight in a particular joke was detrimental to the good reputation of the conference. Am I sorry about that? Of course. Am I going to stop telling the joke? Of course not. The next time you see me, just ask me for The Barbie Joke, and I’ll perform it for you. But still, I wake up in the middle of the night after parties, thinking, My god, I can’t believe I made that joke about O. J. Simpson to Richard Wilbur. Or I walk out of my classroom, stricken with nervous regret, praying nobody files a complaint because I told the joke about the Scotsman and the goat, which I will tell you in chapter 10.

I don’t want to end up like John Santa John Toomey, who for twenty years in a San Franciso Macy’s belted out rich baritone hoho-hos over Santaland. Children adored him and so did adults, for different reasons. When adults sat on his lap, Santa John asked if they’d been good that year. When they said yes, he replied, Gee, that’s too bad. Santa, he told them, was jolly because he knows where all the naughty boys and girls live. It was a bit of shtick he’d been doing for twenty years, and never, he insisted, when children could hear. But in 2010, a middle-aged couple unacquainted with humor asked to sit in his lap, and the sixty-eight-year-old Santa soon found himself, like Archy Armstrong, stripped of his red coat. He died of a heart attack nine months later.

With all due respect to Bill Maher and Don Imus, both fired for jokes they told, the most famous joke-instigated firing in recent history was probably the 1976 canning of Earl Butz, President Gerald Ford’s secretary of agriculture. Butz was apparently an inveterate joker. At the 1976 Republican National Convention, he amused himself by pitching pennies at the secretary of the treasury, a stunt that walks the line between gratingly juvenile and almost charming. Who better to pitch pennies at?

After Ford was nominated, Butz flew out of Kansas City, accompanied by John Dean, who was covering the convention for Rolling Stone. In Rituals of the Herd, Dean recounts how he introduced Butz to Pat Boone, and then asked Butz about the tepid reaction to Bob Dole’s vice presidential acceptance speech. Butz, with what John Dean called a mischievous smile, said, Oh, hell, John, everybody was worn out by then. You know, it’s like the dog who screwed the skunk for a while until it finally shouted, ‘I’ve had enough!’  Folksy and apt, it’s a wonderful metaphor for a political convention grinding to an exhausted end, and it demonstrates Butz’s humorous acuity at its most incisive.

But there was something else going on too. Butz was enjoying messing with Pat Boone’s head. Boone, the 1950s pretty-boy alternative to Elvis, was so excruciatingly proper he once refused to kiss his movie costar because she was married in real life. In the presence of such a famous Goody Two-shoes, the earthy Butz couldn’t resist telling a joke about a dog screwing a skunk to a standstill. Butz didn’t stop there:

Pat gulped, then grinned and I [Dean] laughed. To change the subject Pat posed a question: John and I were just discussing the appeal of the Republican party. It seems to me that the party of Abraham Lincoln could and should attract more black people. Why can’t that be done? This was a fair question for the secretary, who is also a very capable politician.

I’ll tell you why you can’t attract coloreds, the secretary proclaimed as his mischievous smile returned. Because coloreds only want three things. You know what they want? he asked Pat.

Pat shook his head; so did I.

I’ll tell you what coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit. That’s all!

Pat gulped twice.

We can easily understand why Pat gulped, but it’s almost as easy to understand why Butz enjoyed messing with Pat Boone. Confronted by Boone’s historically naïve question about why blacks don’t vote for the Party of Lincoln—there was a long century between Ford’s Theatre and the resignation of Richard Nixon—Butz must have found it irresistible to tell a racist joke that also requires he say pussy and shit. Who wouldn’t want to rattle such an earnest interlocutor? The joke jabs a cruelly precise needle into Boone’s assumption that Republicans took the black vote seriously. It doesn’t just explain why blacks don’t vote Republican; it consciously demonstrates why. Blacks know that Republicans like Butz perceive them as little more than animals, and Butz knows they know. He is not only telling Boone all this, he’s also deliberately flaunting his personal contempt as well as enacting his political calculation of how little chance Republicans have of attracting black voters.

For all the subtexts buried in it, the joke is still a nasty piece of work, its racism supercharged by the rhythm of the punch line but unadulterated with wit. It relies almost entirely on the shock value of cramming as much racism, misogyny, and scatology into as few words as possible. Interestingly, Butz avoided the charged word that’s obviously missing; he substitutes coloreds for niggers, slightly ameliorating the shock he’s depending on.

I’m not the only reader curious about where the humor might be hiding in this painfully crude joke. According to Gareth Morgan in Butz Triads: Towards a Grammar of Folk Poetry published in Folklore, Butz’s joke is actually a fairly well-known southwestern triad:

The three things that a nigger likes:

Tight pussy,

loose shoes,

and a warm place to shit.

It’s the same pattern as What are little girls made of? / Sugar, / and spice / and all things nice, / that’s what little girls are made of and Pease porridge hot, / pease porridge cold, / pease porridge in the pot, nine days old—with the third item in the list having twice as many beats as the first two. Morgan traces the pattern back to an epigrammatic masterpiece from ancient Sumer: Aba garra? Aba galla? Aba urma ganna aburu? (Who is miserly? / Who is opulent? / For whom shall I reserve my vulva?) The rhythm of Butz’s joke gives it some power, but these examples demonstrate just what’s missing: rhyme, wordplay, or wit. The only surprise is the loose shoes—a mildly amusing image leavened with assonance—but that’s hardly enough to make anyone laugh.

Or is the whole crudeness of the humor somehow the point? Does the joke simply hope to keep piling up ugliness till someone laughs in incredulity or agreement? Is it supposed to work like the joke I heard when Ricky Walker leaned over to me in tenth grade and asked, Do you know what the American Dream is?

Yeah, it’s some ideal about, uh . . .

No. It’s all the niggers swimming back to Africa. With a Jew under each arm.

How could they swim like that? I said, sneering at the contradiction in his joke, only to be told, witheringly, That’s the point. Then he laughed at my dawning consternation.

Was Ricky’s joke only a joke?

It’s only a joke was more or less Butz’s defense, and it’s one every joker resorts to when a humor bomb blows up in his face: You know, I don’t know how many times I told that joke, and everywhere—political groups, church groups, nobody took offense, and nobody should. I like humor. I’m human. Butz was almost certainly lying. It’s hard to imagine many pastors, even those few who didn’t flinch from the racism, chortling at pussy and shit while mounding their Styrofoam plate with scalloped potatoes and Sea Foam Salad. But like Butz, I too have weakly mustered It’s only a joke, when my love of a joke’s audacity enticed me into an amoral blindness to what’s being said. Every time I think of Earl Butz, I wince and think, There but for the grace of God—and the fact that reporters don’t follow me around the country—go I.

Religious bigotry, racism, sexual discomfort, and death provide the tension in jokes, the friction to wordplay’s lubrication, and in this thematic memoir of my life as a joker, the story of my life shifts back and forth in time as I explore how I learned to think about religion, race, and sex through the complex and often unattractive medium of jokes. Even in their frequent ugliness I love jokes. They illuminate how we think and the often irresolvable contradictions our lives are built on. The laughter they draw from us both expresses our sorrow at our inconsistency and soothes it. I love the sound of laugher; my voice joining almost musically with yours in a fearful celebration of how the frailties of others are also our own.

One

Catch It and Paint It Green

I was slow to delight in disorder, in which words didn’t mean what I’d understood them to mean and in which phrases had secret histories I couldn’t know. I was an anxious child, one who sat at his desk and, sounding out words so he could spell them, felt them dissolve on his lips. Or I wrote them with such attention to each mark of the pencil that they disintegrated into their component lines and curves, hooks, and squiggles. Clutching a child’s fat pencil, I painstakingly etched words, upstroke and downstroke, onto the lined paper of my Blue Horse Pencil Tablet, paper so near to pulp you could see brown flecks of bark and heartwood in it. I concentrated on the letters until they started to look queer, alien, wrong. I looked back and forth from the book to my handwriting, trying to see what I had copied incorrectly. When I found no mistake, I distrusted my eyesight. I often erased the word and wrote it again, spelling it the same correct way as the first time but trying to make it look right in my handwriting. I wrote and erased and wrote and erased till I rubbed holes through the paper.

The sounds of the words were even slipperier than their shapes. Certain small, obvious words were the most likely to crumble in my mouth. As I repeated them, the sounds shifted and the word warped. The word word was one of the worst. The w stretched out or shortened as I said it different ways. So did the ur sound following it. And the duh at the end could be the end of one syllable or break off and establish itself as a separate syllable if I over-enunciated, which I almost always did once I started to think about what I was saying. I was terrified by the porcelain delicacy of words. Language was so fragile I could break it just by trying to grasp it, and since it was the only tool I had to make sense of the world, if I destroyed it I also destroyed my own identity. Several times I was so terrified by a word’s crumbling in my mouth that I stretched out on the floor between my brother’s bed and my own—a place where no one could see me—and cried until I was panting.

Maybe I should have asked my mother for help, but I remembered working myself into a frenzy when, trying to write a sentence for a homework assignment, I had a word slip out of my mind—a basic word, one I should’ve known. I burst into the kitchen, gasping, Wuz! Mama, wuz! I was frantic, my face sticky with tears, but even in my agitation I saw excessive alarm spread across her face. I’d been born two and a half months premature and then placed for several weeks on a respirator that stunted some babies’ development by over-oxygenating their brains. Mom had watched for it, braced for it, probed for it, and at long last brain damage had raced into her kitchen, clutched her leg, clamped its damp face to her belly, hysterically begging, Wuz!

What? What are you saying? she demanded as I clung to her, wailing, Wuz, Mama, wuz? Her body was stiff with fear.

Finally she grasped what I couldn’t put into words. I could feel her muscles relax. Smiling with more amusement than I thought my stupidity called for, she spelled out, W-A-S.

Wuz was restored to its essential was-ness, and I immediately calmed down. But words remained skittery. The was a persistent vexation, shifting between a short e sound and or a long e that knocked it up against thee from the Bible. Not much later, mama changed. One day she snapped, "Don’t call me Mama, boy. I’m your mom." She didn’t want to be a countrified mama, as her mother was to her and her sister back in Georgia was to her boys. The wife of an air force officer, she wanted to be that modern thing, a mom. My calling her Mama, especially in front of her friends, undermined how she wanted to see herself. It was hard for me to imagine words having the power to change who we are and still being able to fall apart when looked at too closely, but there was Mama’s—Mom’s—clear demonstration of it happening.

Words were, I thought, like eggs. Hold them loosely and they fall through your fingers and splatter on the linoleum; grasp them too tightly and they are crushed, messily, in your hands. Or maybe words were more like the photos in the newspaper. If I looked at them from across the room, they blurred into blotchy gray shadows, but if I hovered over the pictures, my nose grazing the page, all I could see were individual gray dots. The discomfort of trying to focus on the dots made me suspect that eyes weren’t supposed to be used this way. To make sense of the photos, I had to hold them somewhere between too far and too close, just as I had to hold the egg firmly enough to control it but not so firmly that it cracked. Words worked the same way. Words, and maybe the whole world, had to be held gently and understood from the proper distance if they were to mean something.

•  •  •

The funniest thing about the first joke I ever heard is that my father told it to me. I was sitting on the living room floor in front of the couch, building a cage of Tinkertoys around a cabin made of Lincoln Logs. The long Tinkertoy spokes kept tapping the green roof slats of the log cabin out of place, which was infuriating to a seven-year-old. Frustrated, I was always on the verge of smashing the whole thing flat. I did not like the green slats. I was pretty sure, even then, that the roof of Lincoln’s childhood cabin wasn’t made of boards greener than lime Kool-Aid. The slats’ bright dye made me want to suck them, which I did compulsively, especially once I was forbidden to do so. They turned my lips a morbid gray-green.

Dad stood over me in his air force uniform. He was a captain. He had just returned home from work to the tract house on North Carolina’s Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Craning my neck, I looked up the long expanse from his summer khakis to his pink face, pale blue eyes, and prematurely bald head, and in the tensing of his thin lips, I saw him hesitate. He seemed to be pondering—pondering me. Did the color of my lips give me away?

What’s black and white and red all over? he asked.

What? Wait. Why was he asking? This question sounded a bit like the bullets he fired at me over supper: What’s four plus seven? What’s our address? What’s the capital of South Dakota? Why can’t you just do what you’re told without pouting and whining?

But this question sounded different. There was something worrying and peculiar in the way he almost chanted, as if he both did and didn’t expect me to answer. He seemed amused by my answer before I’d given it. And what a confusing question. If something was black and white, it couldn’t be red at the same time. That was just basic to knowing what words meant, wasn’t it? My father’s lips were now pressed into a tight line. I was taking too long to answer.

The only thing I could think to say always meant trouble.

I don’t know.

A newspaper, he said, grinning.

I closed my eyes, retreated into my mind to absorb the answer. I couldn’t do it. I opened them, looked at my father, my head cocked to the side—apprehensive, stupid, trying to think and failing. Nothing connected. This was not unusual in my relations with the adult world. I must have looked like a beagle instructed to determine pi.

I don’t understand.

A newspaper is read, he said and nodded. He was encouraging me to keep working at it.

I conjured a picture of a newspaper painted red. I envisioned Dad painting the kitchen stool. He’d spread newspaper on the carport floor and then placed the unfinished wooden stool upside down in the middle of it. The paint often over-sprayed onto the Goldsboro News-Argus, covering much of the paper with a glossy coat of royal-blue enamel. In my mind I turned the blue paint to red. But that didn’t help. Where the newsprint was red, it was no longer black and white.

A newspaper is read after you read it, Dad said.

"But it’s not red. It’s still black and white."

Listen to me! It’s R-E-A-D, not R-E-D. The same word means different things.

That’s not fair! It’s cheating!

It’s not cheating. It’s a joke.

It doesn’t make sense! I wailed.

"It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s a joke, you stupid idiot!" he snapped, and marched out of the room.

After he was gone, I remember sitting on the carpet, tapping one Lincoln Log with another. Read sounds the same as red. Now that my father’s expectant eyes were no longer locked on me, I got it. The joke had faked me out by leading me to think the sound meant one thing when it really meant another. If that wasn’t cheating, I didn’t know what was. But the margins in a newspaper, I thought, weren’t read, so it wasn’t actually read all over, was it? And what about the pictures? Did looking at them count as reading? I didn’t think so.

A few minutes later, Dad came back in the living room—to make amends, I now realize—and asked me why the chicken crossed the road.

I don’t know, I said. That seemed to be a safe answer to these joke things.

To get to the other side.

I nodded as if I understood, tried to smile, and he left the room again, appeased if not happy. In a way I did understand. The joke was a parable about simplicity. The chicken’s crossing the road was broken down to its simplest possible motivation, but one so fundamental as to be completely dull and unsatisfying. I’d come dangerously close to asking Dad what chicken we were talking about. The chickens in my grandmother’s grassless backyard waddled in circles, scratching the Georgia red clay for bugs and overlooked feed corn, and not a single hen had ever shown the least interest in crossing Vineyard Road. I had, though, seen plenty of others flopped dead by drainage ditches, their red and brown feathers erect in the backwash of air as our station wagon shot past, and I vividly remembered seeing a dead chicken humped at the base of a mailbox, a dog jabbing his muzzle into the carcass. Crossing the road was a skill in which many chickens were fatally deficient but maybe they possessed desires I was unaware of.

I was a single-minded little literalist and these jokes seemed like annoyances made of words, not life, the way math problems at school were annoyances made of numbers. If you had two apples and Mr. Smith gave you three, Mrs. Johnson gave you four, and Miss Ingle gave you three, how many apples would you have? I understood the mathematics behind the silly question, but I couldn’t imagine a world where grown-ups